Archives
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#5 Article in Visual Studio Magazine for 2013
Greg Shackles and I write the Cross Platform in C# column for Visual Studio Magazine. This column started in January 2012 with an email from Keith Ward regarding my interest in a monthly column on what was then called Mono for Android. He had seen several of my articles already (I'm shocked he was interested because he HAD seen the articles) and had seen a good number of page views associated with them. First off, I was pleasantly surprised. It is an honor to have anyone think highly enough to want a guy that failed english in high school to want to write a column. Secondly, I had to think on this for a while. My friend Doug Turnure had asked me about joining a secret project at Microsoft to pump up the number of Windows 8 apps at launch. Thankfully, that did not happen, at least they did not want me on it. I never recieved any more info on it, so I just considered that they had enough people and weren't look for any more.
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Take Advantage of iOS 7's New Features
Link: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2013/12/01/take-advantage-of-ios-7s-new-features.aspx
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Building Native User Interfaces is the Right Way To Build Cross Platform Style Apps
I hear a few developers getting down on Xamarin because they are required to:
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Cross Platform with Visual Studio 2013 & Xamarin Meetup - Atlanta - December 11
I'll be at a Meetup in Atlanta on December 11, 2013. I'll be talking about:
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Async & Await in C# with Xamarin
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What's new in Xamarin and iOS7 - webinar
I recently did an online webinar regarding the new iOS7 and Xamarin. In it, I covered the basics of what is new in iOS7 along with what is new in Xamarin's developer platform. Please take some time and view this webinar. The items that were covered include:
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Building a UI in Xamarin.iOS
No matter your feelings toward Apple, there's no denying the marketplace likes the iPhone and iPad family of products. You can't ignore them, and because you're reading this column, I thought it would be interesting to look at the options you have for creating a UI with Xamarin.iOS. There are two options I'll look at in-depth:
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HTML5 Threading with Web Workers and Data Storage with IndexedDB - MSDN Article
In a previous article, I looked at the HTML5 <video> tag and History object, two of the many features that developers have started to implement to give users of their apps new input controls, jQuery Mobile features, location and mapping, and much more. In this article, I continue exploring HTML5 features with a look at Web Workers, which let you speed up your client-side applications, and Indexed DB, a client-side data storage mechanism that is the preferred storage approach going forward in HTML5. (Before Indexed DB—also known as the Indexed Database API—work was focused on a standard named WebSQL. That work was discontinued in the fall of 2010. IndexedDB is the result of follow-on work to create a standard for data storage in Web browsers.)
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Shrinking an image in iOS with Xamarin.iOS and C#
Images taken with the camera are rather large in the iPhone. How do you shrink them down? I need to shrink them because I am going to send them to a web service and I want to spend as little time as possible in the upload process. While I am not sure that this is the best code, it seems to be working for me. I want to put this out for sharing and if you have a suggestion on how to make it better, please let me know.
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Video and History support in HTML5 with Internet Explorer 10 - Article on MSDN
Who hasn’t started looking at the mobile Web and HTML5—features like the viewport, new HTML5 controls, geolocation and many others that are part of smartphones, tablets and advanced browsers? With these features, developers have started to provide users with fairly common, new input controls; jQuery Mobile features; location and mapping; and much more. In this article, I describe two features that you might not be familiar with: the <video> tag and Web history. The <video> tag lets you display video without the need for plug-ins like Flash. Web history allows users to use the Back button to return to the previous page in an AJAX application.
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Tech After Dark - Mobile Web Development - August 27-29
url: http://devproconnections.com/tech-after-dark-mobile-web-development
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UIRefreshControl Timeout with Xamarin.iOS
The UIRefreshControl doesn't have a timeout mechanism built into it. Once the refresh begins, the control will display that a refresh is occurring until the .EndRefreshing() method is called. Because we are in a mobile environment, the data may never come back. We don't want to display the UIRefreshControl forever. Solving this problem is actually pretty simple. Setup a timer and when the timer runs, call .EndRefreshing(). Here is some code I used for this:
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Using the UIRefreshControl with the UICollectionView in Xamarin.iOS
If you have used Twitter on an iPhone, you are familiar with the concept of pull to refresh. When you work with a UITableViewController, there is a .Refresh property that can be used to assign a Refresh Control to. A UICollectionViewcontroller has many similarities. Unfortunately, the .RefreshControl property is not one of them. How in the heck are you supposed to provide the same functionality in the UICollectionViewController? It is actually rather simple, but not documented by Apple. I found this on Stack Overflow and translated it to Xamarin.iOS. The steps are:
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Mapping and Location with Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android)
Real Estate is all about location, location, location. Mobile is about maps, location and maps. Maps are an excellent mechanism to communicate information about locations. Maps are graphical, and you know that a picture is worth a thousand words. When users are mobile, presenting a user with a map provides him with easy-to-understand location information in a graphical format. Android provides full mapping support to present maps to users along with a programmable API. In this article, I'll introduce the mapping and location APIs in Mono for Android.
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Article - Create a MapView in Google Maps for iOS
With the introduction of iOS 6 in September 2012, Apple Inc. removed the map system based on Google Maps and introduced its own map system for iPhone and iPad users. The introduction of Apple Maps, like any new technology, came with its own problems.
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Mapping and Location in iOS and Android at Xamarin Evolve 2013
The following is a link to my talk on Mapping & Location in iOS and Android at Xamarin Evolve 2013. Obviously, the talk is centered on MonoTouch, aka Xamarin.iOS, and Mono for Android, aka Xamarin.Android. In this talk, I cover the native functionality of each platform. In addition, I cover Google Maps for iOS SDK. I hope that you find the talk to be helpful.
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Testing WebAPI with Fiddler
I was wanting to test some WebAPI Methods via Fiddler so that I could all be working on one machine, debug, and make sure that everything is working. Here is what my fiddler setup looks like:
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Xamarin.iOS Visual Studio Plugin Article
Url: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2013/04/01/ios-development.aspx
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Juice Up Your Android UI
Recently, I wrote an article for our Mono for Android column about improving your user interface of your applications. The url is: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2013/03/01/enhancing-your-uis.aspx
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Mobile Web Development Featuring jQuery Mobile
Url: http://elearning.left-brain.com/event/mobile-web-development-jquery-mobile?code=EP3234W1
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Free Xamarin Studio and Free Chapters 1-4 Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#
On February 20, Xamarin announced a new version of MonoDevelop called Xamarin Studio. We've been big fans of Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza's work all the way back to the inception of the Mono project so we're especially amped to see Xamarin release a Free Starter Xamarin Studio to bring this great mobile development tool to an even bigger programmer audience.
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MonoTouch Training Course now online: iOS 6 PassKit Coding and Events
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iOS6 for .NET & C# Developers with MonoTouch - New UI Controls
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Introduction to iOS6 Social Networks with MonoTouch
Check out this introduction to iOS6 Social Networks with MonoTouch: http://youtu.be/t-kGZQtKSp8
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iOS6 Introduction with MonoTouch Webinar Recording
This is a recording of my iOS6 with MonoTouch Webinar: http://media.appdev.com/EDGE/LL/livelearn01242013.wmv (I think this only loads in IE)
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MonoTouch: iOS 6 Introduction, Social Media & Maps - Online Training with LearnNowOnline
One of my training courses has just been published by LearnNowOnline. I hope you find it helpful as you take up iOS 6 Development with MonoTouch. Here is some info about it below. Link: http://www.learnnowonline.com/learnmobilenow/topic/296
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iOS6 with .NET, C#, & MonoTouch Seminar
I'll be doing an iOS6 with MonoTouch Seminar on Wednesday at 12 pm EST. A little about the event:
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jQuery Mobile Advanced - More jQuery Mobile and jQuery Mobile Themes
The second two of my three article series on jQuery Mobile have been posted to the MSDN Magazine Script Junkie Site. I hope that they are helpful to you.
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I'm on the Tablet Show to talk MonoTouch and Mono for Android
Carl and Richard talk to Wally McClure about building mobile applications for iPhone and Android using MonoTouch and Mono for Android (respectively). The conversation starts out with Wally's original interest in the Mono tools, being able to leverage his code and skills in C# for mobile development. From there Wally drills into the challenges of tooling across platforms (testing frameworks, etc) as well as dealing with fragmentation of operating systems and SDKs - a bigger issue in Android than iOS, but still an issue.
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Beating the Android Fragmentation Monster with .NET, C#, and Mono for Android - Article
Much has been made about fragmentation of the Android platform. The truth is that the Android platform is not as fragmented as developers think. Google provides a set of libraries that allow older versions of Android to get support for newer APIs. In this article, I'll create a version of the Star Trek navigation application (from my previous column) that runs on Android 2.x to 4.x for handsets and tablets.
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Learn Cross Platform Development for iPhone, iPad, and Android with LearnNowOnline, MonoTouch, and Mono for Android using .NET/C#
I would like to highly encourage you to learn Cross Platform Development for iPhone, iPad, and Android with LearnNowOnline, MonoTouch, and Mono for Android using .NET/C#. By taking your existing knowledge, you can build applications that are best of breed and share code between them across the the iPhone, iPad, and Android platforms. Some of the courses include: